That Little Something: Poems
by Charles Simic

Hardcover $23.00 - 10%

Red Bird: Poems
by Mary Oliver

Hardcover $23.00 - 10%

This collection of sixty-one new poems, the most ever in a single volume of Oliver’s work, includes an entirely new direction in the poet’s work: a cycle of eleven linked love poems—a dazzling achievement. As in all of Mary Oliver’s work, the pages overflow with her keen observation of the natural world and her gratitude for its gifts, for the many people she has loved in her seventy years, as well as for her disobedient dog, Percy. But here, too, the poet’s attention turns with ferocity to the degradation of the Earth and the denigration of the peoples of the world by those who love power. Red Bird is unquestionably Mary Oliver’s most wide-ranging volume.

Why Poetry Matters
by Jay Parini

Hardcover $24.00 - 10%

Poetry doesn’t matter to most people, observes Jay Parini at the opening of this book. But, undeterred, he commences a deeply felt meditation on poetry, its language and meaning, and its power to open minds and transform lives. By the end of the book, Parini has recovered a truth often obscured by our clamorous culture: without poetry, we live only partially, not fully conscious of the possibilities that life affords. Poetry indeed matters.

A gifted poet and acclaimed teacher, Parini begins by looking at defenses of poetry written over the centuries. He ponders Aristotle, Horace, and Longinus, and moves on through Sidney, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Eliot, Frost, Stevens, and others. Parini examines the importance of poetic voice and the mysteries of metaphor. He argues that a poet’s originality depends on a deep understanding of the traditions of political poetry, nature poetry, and religious poetry.

Writing with a casual grace, Parini avoids jargon and makes his case in concise, direct terms: the mind of the poet supplies a light to the minds of others, kindling their imaginations, helping them to live their lives. The author’s love of poetry suffuses this insightful book—a volume for all readers interested in a fresh introduction to the art that lies at the center of Western civilization.

The Open Road: The Global Journey of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama
by Pico Iyer

Hardcover $24.00 - 10%

From Publishers Weekly
This is a brilliant pairing of writer and subject. Iyer has known the Dalai Lama, spiritual and political leader of Tibet, for more than 30 years, thanks to a long-ago connection between the writer’s father, an Oxford don born in India, and a young Dalai Lama. And so the acute global observer Iyer, a travel writer, essayist and novelist, has long followed the fortunes of the astute globalist Tibetan Buddhist, who travels the world but can never go home to his Chinese-occupied country. This is not a biography but an extended journalistic analysis of someone deep enough for several lifetimes, as Tibetan Buddhists believe. Iyer organizes his observations by smart descriptions of aspects of the Dalai Lama’s work and character: icon, monk, philosopher, politician. This allows him to plumb different sides of His Holiness, whom he demythologizes even as he expresses a clear-eyed respect for the leader’s achievements. Iyer reminds readers of paradoxes: the Dalai Lama is highly empirical, yet holds beliefs such as reincarnation that defy observation. He is a public figure who is diligent about elaborate and private religious practices. Like its subject, the aim of this book is ultimately simple: behold the man.
Free Ride: John McCain and the Media
by David Brock & Paul Waldman

Paperback $13.95

We live in a gotcha media culture that revels in exposing the foibles and hypocrisies of our politicians. But one politician manages to escape this treatment, getting the benefit of the doubt and a positive spin for nearly everything he does: John McCain. Indeed, even during his temporary decline in popularity in 2007, the media continued to support him by lamenting his fate rather than criticizing the flip flops and politicking that undermined his popular image as a maverick.

David Brock and Paul Waldman show how the media has enabled McCain’s rise from the Keating Five scandal to the underdog hero of the 2000 primaries to his roller-coaster run for the 2008 nomination. They illuminate how the press falls for McCain’s “straight talk” and how the Arizona senator gets away with inconsistencies and misrepresentations for which the media skewers other politicians. This is a fascinating study of how the media shape the political debate, and an essential book for every political junkie.

The German Bride: A Novel
by Joanna Hershon

Hardcover $25.00 - 10%

“A surprising novel of grace and refinement. It is a tale of the American West, but unlike any I have ever read before. Hershon enters Willa Cather territory and does it with a rare elegance and complete originality. I was not familiar with Joanna Hershon’s work when I read this novel, and it made me order her first two books.”
——Pat Conroy, author of The Water Is Wide

“Wonderful from start to finish. An immigrant tale and a Western, without the Lower East Side or cowboys. I don’t know why nobody has told such a story before, but I’m glad Joanna Hershon has told it first and told it so well.”
——Mary Doria Russell, author of A Thread of Grace

“A novel of great breadth and depth, a richly imagined pilgrimage into this brave new world. Joanna Hershon paints the portrait of a woman——and her family and suitors, the strange company she starts to keep——with authoritative precision; hers is a first-rate talent and here is a riveting read.”
——Nicholas Delbanco, author of Spring and Fall

“Joanna Hershon’s lush and gripping novel of travel and dislocation exquisitely delineates the shock and loss that accompanied the wild ride of immigration and frontier-living in the mid-nineteenth century. Eva Shein’s heart-in-the-throat journey, from Germany to Santa Fe, is an elegant and mesmerizing testament to human adaptability and survival.”
——Helen Schulman, author of A Day at the Beach

“A highly satisfying story, full of marvelous details that evoke a time when the American West was being built. There is stunning power in Hershon’s finely cadenced prose, and compassion for her characters. This is a novel you can’t put down. Get ready to stay up all night following Eva’s adventures.”
——Jonis Agee, author of The River Wife 

Worlds at War: The 2,500-Year Struggle Between East and West
by Anthony Pagden

Hardcover $35.00 - 10%

Spanning two and a half millennia, Anthony Pagden’s mesmerizing Worlds at War delves deep into the roots of the “clash of civilizations” between East and West that has always been a battle over ideas, and whose issues have never been more urgent.

Worlds At War begins in the ancient world, where Greece saw its fight against the Persian Empire as one between freedom and slavery, between monarchy and democracy, between individuality and the worship of men as gods. Here, richly rendered, are the crucial battle of Marathon, considered the turning point of Greek and European history; the heroic attempt by the Greeks to turn the Persians back at Thermopylae; and Salamis, one of the greatest naval battles of all time, which put an end to the Persian threat forever.

From there Pagden’s story sweeps to Rome, which created the modern concepts of citizenship and the rule of law. Rome’s leaders believed those they conquered to be free, while the various peoples of the East persisted in seeing their subjects as property. Pagden dramatizes the birth of Christianity in the East and its use in the West as an instrument of government, setting the stage for what would become, and has remained, a global battle of the secular against the sacred. Then Islam, at first ridiculed in Christian Europe, drives Pope Urban II to launch the Crusades, which transform the relationship between East and West into one of competing religious beliefs.

Modern times bring a first world war, which among its many murky aims seeks to redesign the Muslim world by force. In our own era, Muslims now find themselves in unwelcoming Western societies, while the West seeks to enforce democracy and its own secular values through occupation in the East. Pagden ends on a cautionary note, warning that terrorism and war will continue as long as sacred and secular remain confused in the minds of so many.
Eye-opening and compulsively readable, Worlds at War is a stunning work of history and a triumph of modern scholarship. It is bound to become the definitive work on the reasons behind the age-old and still escalating struggle that, more than any other, has come to define the modern world–a book for anyone seeking to know why “we came to be the way we are.”

Man and Camel: Poems
by Mark Strand

Paperback $15.00

From Booklist
Strand is a riddler, at once vatic and comedic. A fabulist and a surrealist in the manner of Borges and Calvino, he writes spare, melancholy, and haunting poems. A painter before he became a poet, he translates into words the solitary spell of Edward Hopper and the mystery of Giorgio de Chirico. In his first major collection since the Pulitzer Prize-winning Blizzard of One (1998), Strand imagines an aging Death in a limo “with a blanket spread across his thighs”; and a man who sets out to pick up a cake but fails to do so, perhaps because he’s “lost in thought” for years on end. Vigils are undertaken, and what arrives can be shattering, such as the man and camel in the title poem. People are displaced by unseen catastrophes, and the sea and the moon by turns reveal and conceal. By virtue of Strand’s restraint, archetypal images, and pitch-perfect sense of the music of language, the most common words turn lustrous in poems of startling imagery and extraordinarily deep emotion. Two works originally composed to accompany string quartets are nothing less than sublime, “The Webern Variations” and “Poem after the Seven Last Words.”

The Good Terrorist
by Doris Lessing

Paperback $14.95